‘Se7en’ Looks, Sounds, and Plays Better Than Ever 30 Years After Its Release

When David Fincher directed “Se7en” in 1995, his reputation was strangely bifurcated. On the one hand, he was a supremely successful commercial and music video director at the top of his field, having helmed innovative and influential shorts for icons including Madonna, Sting, and Rick Springfield. On the other, his one attempt at feature filmmaking, “Alien 3,” had been a bust — a critical disappointment liked by virtually no one, including Fincher himself. Although it has since developed a bit of a cult following, Fincher disowned “Alien 3” and famously said that he’d rather die of colon cancer than direct another movie.

Luckily for him, and for us, Fincher changed his mind when he came across Andrew Kevin Walker‘s script for “Se7en,” a perfectly calibrated blend of intellectual philosophizing and pulpy exploitation that ended up beautifully served by Fincher’s unerring ability to push the psychic trauma the story inflicted on the audience right up to the edge of what was tolerable without going over it. The premise — two cops (Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt) track a serial killer whose crimes are inspired by the seven deadly sins — is the kind of sensationalistic high concept parodied by Charlie Kaufman in “Adaptation,” but the ingenuity of Walker’s construction and the Alan J. Pakula-inspired elegance of Fincher’s visual style turned what could have been sleazy trash into high art — without entirely forgoing the guilty pleasures of sleazy trash.

The greatest of the film‘s many provocations is the fact that it’s essentially a three-hander between characters whose worldviews are diametrically opposed yet, in the universe of the movie, equally valid. Freeman’s Somerset is a cynic, a veteran detective on the verge of retirement who doesn’t believe it’s possible to make a grim, violent world a better place. Mills, the younger cop played by Pitt, is an idealist who refers to himself as Serpico (a nod to another of the film’s clear influences, Sidney Lumet) and takes his role cleaning up the streets seriously.

In between lurid set pieces depicting serial killer John Doe’s murders (or, more accurately, their aftermath), Walker gives his protagonists several lengthy debates in which they muse on various moral and philosophical issues; in scenes like these, “Se7en” plays like a rehearsal for Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Counselor,” another Brad Pitt thriller that ends with the horrifying decapitation of a major character. What elevates “Se7en” to classic status and makes it deeply disturbing is the addition of a third character, John Doe, whose crimes are appalling but whose perspective on society’s moral decay is as compelling and convincing as either Mills or Somerset’s.

Part of the power of Doe’s arguments comes from Kevin Spacey’s forceful and eerie performance and part of it comes from the clarity and concision of Walker’s language, but what really makes the character interesting is the fact that he’s a kind of doppelgänger for Somerset — his disgust with the unnamed city in which the film takes place (Walker wrote it while living unhappily in New York) is virtually identical to Somerset’s, as are his moral judgments about the corrosive nature of sin in contemporary society. The difference is that Somerset has succumbed to apathy while Doe takes action, albeit action that inflicts the maximum imaginable trauma on his victims and, by extension, the audience.

‘Seven’Warner Bros.

Like “Manhunter” and “Silence of the Lambs” before it and countless other serial killer movies after it, “Se7en” generates a lot of its visceral power via the contradictory emotional responses it elicits toward its villain. We’re both terrified of the serial killer’s cruelty and impressed by his intelligence and precision. The clockwork scheme that John Doe sets in motion pays off in one of the greatest climaxes of any movie, ever. And it’s impossible not to admire — especially since Doe is a doppelgänger not only for Somerset, but for Fincher himself.

Fincher has returned to serial killers a couple of times since “Se7en” (in “Zodiac” and the Netflix series “Mindhunter”), and it’s not difficult to see why. His famous perfectionism and attention to detail make his style an organic expression of that same fastidiousness in his murderers and their patterns. Though Fincher has resisted the perfectionist label in interviews, how else can you describe a director known for shooting dozens of takes on simple inserts and who works at the highest possible resolution so that he can reframe at will and digitally remove even the slightest camera bump in post?

In any case, Fincher’s perfectionism is one reason “Se7en” stands the test of time, and one reason why it looks and sounds so fantastic on a new 4K UHD release painstakingly supervised by the director. Although there are a handful of minor tweaks that are difficult to notice without a side-by-side comparison of the 4K and previous home video releases, for the most part, Fincher has remained faithful to “Se7en” as remembered by those of us lucky enough to see it when it came out in 1995. (Most of the cosmetic changes are simply adjustments to correct for how unforgiving the 4K UHD format is of flaws that would go unnoticed on lower-resolution formats.)

The sound mix on the new 4K UHD is especially revelatory, as sound designer Ren Klyce has gone back to the original stems and given the layered soundtrack greater clarity and power throughout. There’s a wide dynamic range, but it’s not the kind of disc that will have you riding the remote the whole time like so many UHD releases. The extra features on the disc are ported over from earlier incarnations, but they’re terrific — particularly four separate audio commentaries addressing the film on the topics of acting, writing, visual style, and sound. If you own a past version of “Se7en,” you’ll want to pick this one up for the improved sound and image; if you don’t, the 4K UHD is even more essential given the “film school on a disc” approach Fincher and his collaborators take.

In spite of (because of?) its relentless unpleasantness, “Se7en” was a smash hit 30 years ago and immediately reversed Fincher’s fortunes as a feature filmmaker, paving the way for later masterpieces like “Zodiac” and “Gone Girl.” It remains a nearly perfect film, marred only by a studio-imposed voiceover narration at the end by Freeman that makes no sense on any level — it’s stylistically jarring given that there’s no other voiceover anywhere in the movie, and it’s thematically nonsensical since it makes an argument for good in the world that “Se7en” demonstrably opposes for its entire running time.

If you want to see “Se7en” undiluted by compromise, just mute the volume 40 seconds into the film’s 121st minute — after all, if Fincher can make adjustments to his movie to bring it closer to his original intentions, why can’t the viewer? Even with the silly voiceover, however, “Se7en” remains a movie of incredible impact that gets under the viewer’s skin and stays there; the studio suits did what they could to soften Walker and Fincher’s vision, but like John Doe, the filmmakers’ ferocity could not be suppressed.